McCaffery: No reason to expect 2014 Phillies to be a hit

Philadelphia Phillies' Ryan Howard greets on-deck batter Marlon Byrd at the plate after hitting a third-inning solo home run off New York Yankees relief pitcher Vidal Nuno in an exhibition baseball game in Tampa, Fla., Tuesday, March 25, 2014. Nuno also allowed a solo home run to Byrd in the inning. Yankees catcher Brian McCann is at left rear. AP Photo/Kathy Willens)

Phillies pitcher Cole Hamels delivers in a minor-league game against the Pittsburgh Pirates Triple-A team in Clearwater, Fla., last week. The Phillies hope to get Hamels back from injury as soon as possible after the season opens Monday. (AP Photo/Kathy Willens)

PHILADELPHIA — Jonathan Papelbon looks around the Phillies’ clubhouse and sees winners. He sees world champions and first-place finishers, award-winners and All-Stars and fringe Hall of Fame candidates. And he sees something else.

“Pride,” Papelbon said. “You’ll see.”

It’s come to that all these years later — seven of them since the Phillies began a tidy N.L. East dynasty, six since their world championship, five since they were last in the World Series. It’s come to the point where there is no longer a value in projecting what might happen, just a reminder that something good once did.

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“We have a track record,” is the way Ruben Amaro keeps selling it, and for that, he believes the Phillies will be, “contenders, yes.”

It’s one way to look at a season. But it’s not the way to look at the one the Phillies will embark on Monday in Texas. It’s not the way because the Phillies really do not want their image to be connected to the past. That’s because the past — the most recent, relevant past — suggests only that they will not, cannot be a worthwhile offensive ball club in their current, decaying form.

It was fine to do that three years ago, or two, even. But not now, not after the Phillies lost 89 times last season, not after they just completed a truly useless preseason, one punctuated by three consecutive scoreless games.

How to best say this? OK, here: They can’t hit.

They can’t hit, and they haven’t hit well enough since about midway through 2010, when a slump became so bizarre that Milt Thompson had to be fired as the batting coach. It has been a slump that the Phillies keep expecting to end, but never does. It cost Greg Gross a job, too. Charlie Manuel, too. It is a slump years in development, born of the normal causes, which would be age, injury and stubbornness. Five Phillies regulars will be 34 or more years old this season. Five projected starters — Ryan Howard, Chase Utley, Domonic Brown, Carlos Ruiz and Ben Revere — have recently padded injury yellow sheets.

Still, they pretend they see something that is not there.

“When I look at our lineup and see the speed at the top of the order, and see the bats in the middle and the right-left combinations that we do have,” Ryne Sandberg said, “and the bats that we have at the bottom of the order, it has the makings of a good lineup.”

They have the makings of what would have been a good lineup three, four or five years ago. But their bat speed — and their speed on the basepaths — has vanished. Players who were once power threats — Utley, Ruiz, Howard, Jimmy Rollins — too infrequently sent outfielders even onto the warning track. Sustained rallies with balls driven into gaps, players taking extra bases, plate collisions, three-run homers, do not happen.

What? Is there some button to push to turn that around?

“I don’t know about hitting a button,” Brown said. “But I think we have a veteran presence. And we have young guys who will battle. And we have a great lineup.”

They will have a great lineup if all of them play as they did three or four years ago, and if Brown plays as he did when he earned an All-Star Game spot in the first half of last season, but not as he did when he didn’t hit a home run after August 14.

The Phillies will rely on pitching, with Cliff Lee and A.J. Burnett to start the season, with Cole Hamels to recover from injury around June, with Papelbon at the bullpen door. But they tried that, too, collecting four No. 1 starters in 2012, but proving too unable to score in the postseason to make it matter.

It’s over for the Phillies. It’s why Las Vegas figures them for 76 wins, maybe 77. It’s why the fans have begun to leak away. It’s why they have been reduced to relying on nostalgia.

So give them the 77 W’s, and give them fourth place in the N.L. East, and whatever pride they can draw from that.